


Game Over, Player One

by VastDerp



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-07
Updated: 2011-07-07
Packaged: 2017-10-21 03:10:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/220258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VastDerp/pseuds/VastDerp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A thumbnail sketch of the Vast Glub incident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You wake up very confused and a little bit thirsty, with the start of what promises to be a total bitch of a migraine hovering just behind your left ear. One of the dull ones that puts rings around lights and makes everything smell just a little bit like sulfur.

This is all pretty much normal, but something is nagging at the back of your mind under the usual static and noise. Something important that you can’t quite remember.

It’s very bright in here for some reason, so you crack one eyelid with great caution and take in a dull purple glare streaming through your window.

(And why are the curtains open, moron? Do you want to go fucking blind like Terezi?)

Except it’s not your window, and that is not the Alternian sun shining through it. You can assume this because you are bathed in the light and have not yet begun to shriek in horrible agony. You squint at it and realize it's some kind of street light on a pole, and there was certainly nothing like that outside your window when you went to sleep. The sky is indigo-black and there are no stars. Still night, then.

(What the shit is this? Where is the green moon?)

After a few moments of groggy bafflement, the weirdness is too much and you have to sit up and take a proper inventory of the situation. You get this odd feeling like it should hurt, but other than the headache you’re fine, and that seems... wrong, somehow. You guess.

(Something about your client player...?)

If there’s one thing you hate, it’s not knowing what the fuck is going on. This is definitely not your respiteblock. You don’t remember going to sleep, and you’re not in your recuperacoon. You are lying on a wide white metal platform with the cold grooves of the platform’s inlaid symbol sharp and precise under your fingers. This is an alchemiter, but the last time you saw one of these, it was completely spattered with blood because you... Something.

(Did you get her in?)

Had some sort of accident? What? The nagging feeling that you’re missing something comes right up to the edge of making sense and you _almost_ have it.

And then you look down at yourself and discover you are wearing the stupidest lavender pajamas you have ever seen, and there it is.

Oh.

 _OH._


	2. Chapter 2

It all comes back in a rush of memory. Your client player FF, trolling you in tears because the meteors keep hitting closer and closer. The sea around her freaky aquatic palace, boiling away in a storm of bubbles and fire. That horrible monstrous lusus she says she has to feed all the time to keep it from mindraping everyone in the galaxy to death started freaking the fuck out and screaming when suddenly there wasn’t any water anymore, and if a meteor had just hit _her_ the trouble would have ended right there, but you don’t have that kind of luck, you never had that kind of luck.

You remember deploying her equipment. You were mostly ignoring KK’s constant pings because you had to focus on your client player. You snapped on the text-to-voice option and instantly regretted it when the raspy cracking roar of your server player joined the whining in your head and started personalizing all the outrage in the universe just for you. He's always been good at that.

There wasn’t a lot of room for all the shit she needed to get into the Medium. All that palace and no goddamn legroom, what the fuck is even the point of being at the top if you can't move without barking your fucking shin on something?

And of course she wouldn’t let you just throw the cages out the fucking window and you would never be enough of a dick to smash them under the equipment and make the poor girl cry, so you took a few extra seconds of vital time to just push it all to one side in a jumble. You’re pretty sure you apologized, and she was nice about it in that sort of awkward way that means she’s going to make you pay later if you meet up in-game like she’s been glubbing about doing since you first talked to her. Only a few extra seconds, yeah, but then you had to set all the stuff up for her, and the whole time her lusus was bitching away and thrashing the water over FF’s hive into a churn of magenta and black and panic as the precious seconds ticked by and even before you got the lid off the fucking cruxtruder you had this nosebleed that wouldn’t stop and your eyes were starting to smart.

Somewhere in all that, you noticed all your voices had quit babbling at each other and were all more or less screaming the same high note, but by that point you were in a scramble to make your own entry item and your hands kept slipping in all the blood on the punch cards and your vision was all over the place. You were about to prototype one of the stupid seahorse things when the ceiling of FF’s hive cracked open and this thing like a tentacle but _bigger_ slammed down, and you barely got FF out of the way in time because you tried to use the cursor before you remembered that wouldn't work and furthermore that you could just MOVE her, and you were feeling sort of loopy and never even thought to shove the kernel aside too, and just like that her stupid lusus was prototyped instead of crushing FF and her hive underneath it. Which is better than letting FF die, you guess, but you're pretty sure from what you saw in the clouds that you fucked up big time by getting distracted. The lusus dying should have stopped the noise, but it didn't. The shriek just kept going on and on in the same high note as the other voices, and holy FUCK there was a lot of them all of a sudden.

Somewhere around that point your memory just starts to fall apart. You’re fairly sure that at one point after KK deployed your own gear, the kernel was flashing redblue redblue redblue and getting up in your face wanting to be prototyped, and there was a shower of dust and glass from your own broken-open hivestem wall as something really huge and bleeding the same color as you went past (did you do that? You don't think you did that), and sometime later a chime from your husktop. Someone started telling you over and over through your system speakers to _take that shitty broken mask you just made and put the two sides back together, hey fuckass, stay with me here, PICK UP THE FUCKING PIECES YOU IDIOT THEY'RE RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU LOOK. WHERE. I. AM. POINTING._ and you wanted to yell at the voice to quit nagging you like a retarded wriggler, you’re a goddamn genius for fuck’s sake, but secretly you were having kind of a hard time following what they wanted you to do or exactly who was doing the asking anyway.

You kept dropping the pieces and your hands didn’t want to cooperate with your head, and somehow you had trouble making the eyehole things line up. And all the while that voice kept telling you to _wake up and pay attention, asshole, your timer is almost to zero and you need to put the pieces together SOLLUX GODDAMN IT if you don’t get up and PUT THOSE PIECES TOGETHER RIGHT THE FUCK NOW I WILL KICK YOUR FUCKING ASS get up GET UP--_

Something bounced off the back of your head, probably a book or a game or something, because the asshole was pelting you with shit off your desk to the beat of his yowling, and that finally made you just mad enough to get back off the alchemiter where you were sitting to rest for just a moment and try to fix the stupid infuriating stupid ugly stupid fucking mask one last time, just to get him off your bulge, just to show the asshole you didn't need him holding your hand, and when the red half and the blue half finally touched they sort of fused together and you forgot to be smug and opened your mouth to laugh triumphantly, but all that came out was this huge bubble of blood. It grew and grew and popped and the blood went everywhere and you dropped the mask and it broke _but who fucking cares about that anyway and finally the screaming and the gravelly snarls of the hugest douche you have ever met were finally drowned out by a rumbling sound so immense it filled the world until everything was one long white streak of empty sound that widened from a ribbon into a horizon line that showed nothing but black on the other side--_

So basically, you died. You died while KK was bitching at you.

(Oh god. No wonder you woke up stupid.)

You know how the game’s extra life system works. You adapted the fucking thing from the ground up. So you're pretty sure somebody on the other side kissed you and woke up your dream-self, which is a little bit awkward because you’re pretty sure you forgot to brush your teeth this morning before you murdered your lusus and entire species and died horribly. You wonder who it was, and hope it wasn’t AA. You’re still kind of pissed at her for earlier.

The other thing that puzzles you is that you’re obviously on Derse, but you’re a Prospit dreamer. You’ve been awake there for at least a sweep, working on the game in your tower room and occasionally taking breaks to hang out with TZ and KN. Usually chilling with Terezi means getting drafted into a courtroom flarp drama, but you privately don’t mind it that much. TZ is weird, but she’s cool and funny and doesn’t treat you like too much of a freak. Kanaya’s okay too, but she likes to make you to model clothes for her all the time, and while you guess it’s the least you can do in exchange for her admittedly fantastic relationship advice, does she really _need_ to take pictures of you in that stupid fucking bee costume?

In fact, you were just on Prospit like half an hour ago, watching the future of your session unfold in a bunch of painfully fluffy oracle clouds. So maybe this Derse thing is a glitch in the game. But fuck that, no, your code is good. You double-checked it before you even considered sending the files to your friends. You aren’t a complete idiot.

You shrug the question off for now, making a mental note to ask AA later. Backstabbing jerk or not, she’s still the only other person who has a clue about how this game works. For now, you have a headache and some serious adventurin’ to do.


	3. Chapter 3

It takes maybe half a day to get all the way from Derse to the planet you saw in the clouds. It’s even uglier up close, a global catastrophe of brains, fire and shitty collapsing temples. You can’t tell if the place has proper consorts or if the brains that keep nudging into you are just part of the scenery, so you play it safe and don’t give them too hard a time on your long trip to the place where you figure your hivestem will be. You hope KK got a planet even dumber and more personally insulting than yours or you will never hear the end of this.

After for-fucking-ever you see the light of your first gate, and some distance beneath, the smashed-open hivestem itself. All the other units have been burned or broken off, but you figure by the time that happened, your lowblood neighbors would have been Glubbed to death anyway. It’s still pretty fucked up, though, as is the empty rooftop where your lusus used to live. You think KK probably prototyped him at some point during the blur of your final moments, at least.

And there she is in person, your client player. She’s taller than you expected, and somewhat more violent. She’s got a totally sweet double-ended trident and has been putting it to use stabbing any brain that approaches the crumpled and disgusting black-and-gray mass on the alchemiter platform. Shit, is that really what you look like?

At least FF looks kind of hot all covered in your blood. This is just... gross.

“You actually _kithhed_ that thing?” you marvel aloud.

She sees you coming down through the split-open ceiling and jumps about a meter. Too late, you realize that she has been alone with your corpse and a bunch of disembodied organs for the better part of a day, and might not appreciate being startled. You just barely avoid being run through with that trident (damn, she’s got some reflexes on her for a froofy princess) before she realizes it’s you and not some kind of freaky twelvefold-prototyped purple loser imp.

“SOLLUX CAPTOR!” she snaps. “DON’T DO THAT! I ALMOST CULLED YOU ALL OVER AGAIN!”

“Thorry.”

She lowers her weapon but doesn’t put it away. She is looking at you funny.

“What?”

“You sound EXACTLY like your typing quirk,” she finally says.

You wince.

“But I LOVE your pajamas.”

You wince even harder. You had kind of hoped to change into your real clothes before anyone could see you like this.

“I didn’t know you were a Derse dreamer too!” she goes on, voice rising a little in pitch. She sounds exactly like _her_ typing quirk too, but you keep this to yourself lest it encourage her to be even more ENTHUSIASTIC. You‘re already wigging enough.

“Did you see me? I’m not awake yet but Eridan swears I’ve got a whole tower in the sky. Is it as awesome as he says? Can you really fly there?” She is bouncing on her heels. Her wavy black hair bounces around her head. Other things bounce that you try not to stare at too much. You are not good with girls.

“Uhhh.” You think this over. “I didn’t know either. No, I didn’t thee you. It’th all right, I guethh. And I already could but you probably can when you wake up there.” Did you miss any? Damn, she moves fast.

She gives you this goldfish look, all eyes behind swim goggles, and then busts out giggling. You need to get the hell away from this crazy girl.

“You are ADORKABLE!” she says, and pinches your cheek. _Oh god what._ “And I never got to thank you for saving my life.”

 _Oh god oh god oh god_ she’s going to kiss you again. With a little bit of your blood still dried on her lower lip. _Oh god._

“ATTENTION DISGUSTING FUCKHEADS.” someone snarls from the other side of the block.

You break apart just in time and turn as one to stare at the speaker system (which you wired yourself, thanks). KK’s voice is even raspier than it was when you were dying, but unmistakable.

“YES, HELLO, I’M TALKING TO YOU TWO. HI ASSHOLES. WAVE FOR THE VIDEO FEED AND THE COPIOUSLY VOMITING FOLKS BACK HOME, WHY DON’T YOU?”

Fuck. You forgot people could see you. He is never going to let you live this down.

Wait, a pretty girl was going to kiss you two seconds after you met. You’re never going to let _him_ live this down.

“Who’s yelling at us from your husktop?” FF asks, frowning. “He sounds jealous.”

“Pay him no mind,” you assure her. “KK’th the nubby-horned king of doucheth and failure.”

“YEAH THANKS FOR THAT. HOW’S THE MEDIUM TREATING YOU, CAPTOR? ALL SNUGGLY AND WARM IN THE LAND OF BRAINS AND FUCK? YOU’RE WELCOME, BY THE WAY, FOR THE WHOLE _GETTING YOU IN BEFORE THE WORLD ENDED_ THING. JUST PART OF MY JOB, NO SWEAT AT ALL.”

“KK, in cathe you missed the memo, that’th my cooling corpthe over there thmelling like a meat packing plant in high thummer. So pointth for effort I guethh, but it cotht me my thpare life just getting in here.”

“YEAH BECAUSE SOMEBODY WAS ALL LIKE “oh dude what’th left and right hurrrr” UNTIL THE TIMER WAS AT LIKE TEN SECONDS.”

“KK theriouthly, I don’t even thound like that, you never do it right--”

“Okay, okay, BOYS!” FF tries to cut in and change the topic, but she’s a newcomer to the nuanced art of making Vantas feel like the squalling grub he so is, and you run right over her. Bellowing at your husktop is something you are very, very good at, and when it screams right back no amount of cute girl in your room is going to distract you from the only important thing left in the universe: scoring points.

You waste half an hour on this nonsense before she gives up stomping around your hive with the fingers of both small hands jammed into that riot of floofy hair, shrieks out a final curse of pure dismay, and whacks you over the head with the side of her double trident. You lose track of your epic insult and boggle vacantly at her incandescent outrage.

KK is so wrapped up in laughing at your misfortune that he never has time to ask if you’re still friends before she unplugs the system from the wall and turns to face you with a look that promises culling if you so much as grumble.

“That’s better,” Feferi says, smiling in a way that shows all of her weird shark seadweller teeth. “Now, I’m going to go wash brain guts and SOMEONE’S blood off before I start attracting scavengers. What do you say we get something to eat and try that dungeon to the west of here when I get back?”

You nod in defeat and pray she won’t think this is a date or something.

(It's totally a date.)

The two of you leave the place to the brains and fire, and head off to climb the echeladder. Neither of you thinks twice about the corpse on the alchemiter. Trolls don't bury their dead anyway, and you can always throw it out a window later if it starts to stink too much.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be porn but I got distracted by plot pretty much coming out the gate and it turned into a proper story instead.
> 
> Whoops.


End file.
